How can organizations build a future-ready workforce when 86% of professionals want to continue working from home from the long-term?
It’s the central challenge at the heart of our global remote work shift, and a growing trend in organizations across industries and sizes. Yet there’s a silver lining behind the employee preference for WFH, with a majority of employees noting they’d be perfectly happy to work both partly from the office and from home. This new hybrid work model is quickly becoming the standard across industries and organizations of all sizes.
Each organization’s remote working technology, policies, and practices will look different, and building the right structure for new hires and long-time staff alike is an iterative process. Implementing the right remote technology management can not only expedite this necessary hybrid shift, but also empower staff to get more done from anywhere.
Self-Service Assistance
The productivity gains of remote working technology have been well-noted by now, with a recent study finding 90% of employees get as much or more done when working from home. Alongside the time gained from eliminating their commutes and the ability to approach work on their schedules, these gains to productivity are among the biggest benefits to working from anywhere.
Now, organizations can cement these improvements by removing the remaining impediments regarding technology and remote working. Time spent on troubleshooting and reaching out for assistance—whether it’s to request new equipment, access software and applications, or pursue any task that requires approval—often gets in the way of productivity gains.
Management teams noted these roadblocks to employee success early on in their shifts to remote work. Now, the capability exists for teams to head off these issues through robust employee-centric web portals and self-service automations that expedite the most common types of requests.
This means less of a burden on IT staff tasked with making remote infrastructure run smoothly, and more time to make further improvements in the way teams collaborate for growth. Giving workers the tools to pursue these improvements themselves meshes well with the independent nature of remote work.
Unified Communications
The new virtual workplace is increasingly built on a hybrid work model. With staff going into the office every day, others working fully remote, and the remainder switching between both, ensuring communications are seamlessly connected across environments is a needed priority.
Developments in cloud technology have truly accelerated the potential for this collaboration model, bringing communications out of the era of analog phone lines and improving on the offerings of turn-of-the-century technology such as VoIP.
Adopting the right devices is critical. Remote teams can have the same capability to drop easily into a meeting and hold discussions with in-office staff via unified communications teleconferencing equipment, without the need for each individual to set up their own chat request. By integrating these devices into office meeting rooms, organizations create a more seamless experience for all staff, ensuring that remote workers aren’t left out of the loop when it comes to critical matters.
Cloud-Based Work Culture
A key hurdle on the path to developing a resilient hybrid workforce is in deciding what workplace culture looks like in this new era of growth. Organizations can take a cloud-first approach to these endeavors, ensuring their values and goals are distributed with the widest range possible for every stakeholder, no matter where they’re located.
This outlook starts with equipment policies. Deciding which devices each team member will use, and where these devices come from—whether it’s bring-your-own-device (BYOD), device-as-a-service (DaaS) subscriptions, outright buying the equipment, or otherwise—can influence the development of cloud infrastructure. From there, identifying, installing, and securing the most useful cloud-based applications gains focus, as IT teams prioritize the creation of a truly virtual workspace.
Many of these applications primarily help employees get more done, but there are other uses for leaders to be aware of. The insights available into who’s working on what, from where, and to what extent can all be had almost-instantly thanks to AI-backed data analytics. Real people, however, make the decisions on what to do with this data—which teams need more support, who’s pushing themselves toward overwork, and where the gaps in communications lie all become answerable in a way that was never possible in fully in-person environments.
Leveraging the possibilities of the cloud directly into how an organization operates is still a novel process, yet the familiarity is growing. All of us became accustomed to some form of this work in 2020—looking ahead, the focus is on identifying the areas where interaction lacks in a virtual-first environment. Building these connections allows team culture to spread as work gets done.
The Advantages of Hybrid Teams
Taking a long-standing organization into a brand-new hybrid model is undoubtedly a daunting task. At the center of all these changes is the simple need to adapt. The very nature of work has shifted in virtually every industry, and more developments—expected, and unexpected—are certainly on the horizon.
Much as the best employees draw satisfaction from their tasks, the most resilient dispersed teams will remain mindful of the positive capabilities inherent in hybrid work. From unlocking the possibility of truly asynchronous collaboration to freeing resources for new investments in wellness and actually making work-from-anywhere a reality, the advantages associated with realizing these changes are profound.
Ready to take your work from anywhere and hybrid work models to the next level? Connect with Tangoe and see how our AI-driven platform and services can help.